Most B2B Purchases Don’t Fail at the Proposal Stage. They Fail Before That.
By the time a vendor is shortlisted, most buying teams have already spent months in a loop — gathering information, circling back on priorities, trying to build internal consensus. The vendor gets blamed for a slow process that was broken long before they arrived.
Gartner research puts the average B2B buying group at 11 or more stakeholders. Each brings different priorities. Few have a shared method for working through a complex purchase decision together. The result isn’t a vendor problem. It’s a process problem.
What PRESSURE Does for Buying Teams
PRESSURE gives buying teams a structured decision process for navigating large, complex purchases. It’s not a vendor selection tool — it’s a way to align your internal team before, during, and after engagement with the market.
Running as a facilitated workshop, PRESSURE helps a buying committee:
- Define the actual problem the purchase is meant to solve (not the problem they originally assumed)
- Surface the constraints and trade-offs that matter to different stakeholders
- Identify where internal disagreement will surface — and address it before it stalls the process
- Commit to a shared decision with documented reasoning, not just a ranked list of vendors
Who This Is For
- Procurement and operations leaders managing high-stakes technology or services purchases
- CFOs and COOs involved in major capital or vendor decisions
- Functional leaders who are part of a cross-functional buying committee
- Organizations that have been stuck in a buying process longer than expected
Problems We Help With
- Stalled buying decisions that can’t get to final approval
- Long internal approval cycles driven by stakeholder misalignment
- Buying committees where key members have conflicting criteria
- Purchases that close but underdeliver because the problem wasn’t clearly defined
A Note on Timing
The best time to run a PRESSURE workshop in a buying process is before you go to market — before you’ve issued an RFP or engaged vendors. That’s when you have the most room to define the problem clearly and align your team to what success looks like.
That said, we’ve run it mid-process when buying teams hit a wall. It works there, too.
Buying Team Decision Canvas
Most buying committees have plenty of information and still feel stuck. The real friction is getting a group of smart people to line up behind one decision. This canvas gives your buying team a simple way to work through a complex purchase together, step by step, and leave with a decision everyone understands and owns.
See how the PRESSURE Model applies during other buying scenarios:
Deal Decision
Late-stage deals often sit in “maybe” for weeks with no clear movement. Underneath that, the buying group hasn’t finished its internal decision. This canvas helps you and your champion see where the deal is stuck, what decisions the buyer still needs to make, and what you can do next to help them move.
Strategy Execution
Strategy work usually produces a clear slide deck and a messy reality. Teams keep doing what they were already doing, and nothing material changes. This canvas is for leadership teams who want to make the specific, sometimes uncomfortable decisions that turn a strategy into work people actually do.
Technology Adoption
New systems go live, dashboards look good, and people quietly keep using their old spreadsheets. The missing piece is a set of clear decisions about behavior and support, not more training sessions. This canvas helps you name the behavior changes that matter, who owns them, and how you’ll support them so the technology is used the way you intended.